


The Best Revenge

by NervousAsexual



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: But POV Second Person nonetheless, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, I don't know why POV Second Person, Mind the Tags, Mindfuck, POV Second Person, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 16:38:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19213348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: The remains of Conrad Kellogg take what little revenge he can on Nick Valentine.





	The Best Revenge

You'd think (you'd be wrong, but you'd think) that if you had to be stuck in someone else's head, pulling the strings for the rest of their life, Nick Valentine would be the place to go. He killed you--maybe not in the direct bullet-to-the-head way that certain iced up vault dwellers did, but she wouldn't have found you if not for him--and now you have a front row seat to destroy his life. And if the vault dweller's gonna hang around with him, hell, you can get your claws in her too.

And yet it's not as easy as you thought it would be. It's pretty simple to force your way to the front of his mind, and although you're not sure he knows you're there you can fuck up everything around him. You push through and get control and your first instinct is to put the gun to that vault dweller's head and pull the trigger. But there's something different about inhabiting a synth body. His limbs are so damn heavy all the time, and there's a lag between deciding to do something and actually doing it. It kind of pisses you off. Instead of killing her you just tell the vault dweller how much you want to kill her, and you sit back and give control back to Valentine. When it's his voice coming from his mouth she tells him what just happened, and you wait to see what he does next.

He does nothing.

He apologizes, tells her it's possible there's some of you still left in him. But as far as you can tell there's no horror, no panic, no dread that sets in like cold in his bones. He takes it infuriatingly well.

Fine, you think to yourself. Let's see him do better.

You watch him take on cases and stitch up tears in his coat and live the dull life you always knew he led. Most of the time he doesn't seem to notice you're there.

You decide to try your hand at taking control again. One day when he's sitting at his desk you shove yourself into the driver's seat, take hold of a nearby pencil so tight that Valentine's metal fingers leave grooves in the wood, and drive it deep into his thigh.

Both of you feel the pain and it jolts him back into control. He looks down at the pencil, just sticking out of his leg, then almost casually takes hold of it and pulls it back out. A little bit of coolant stains the leg of his pants, but he just tosses the pencil into a drawer and goes back to what he was doing.

Okay. You get it. Mr. Hard-boiled isn't intimidated by pain. You should have guessed that just by looking at the chunks of skin missing off him. Next time he lets his guard down you'll find a knife and help him pare a nice new gouge in his face, just for the sake of a visual. In the mean time there's other ways to avenge yourself.

Your next thought is to fuck with his work, because that always seemed to be the most important thing in his life, at least when you and the kid were living in Diamond City, but that won't work because he just isn't doing any work. At first you thought maybe business was slow, or he was taking it easy after all his work finding you, but eventually it becomes clear that he's just avoiding it. He probably knows you're looking for ways to screw it all up for him.

So you do the next best thing. You wait for that secretary of his to come in and then you just let it all loose. You say stuff to her that you wouldn't say to the bitch who killed you. You use language Nicky probably don't even know.

Not a single word of it comes out.

If you had a body of your own a chill would go through it. Has he figured out how to take control back from you? But he's not doing anything. He just leans on his desk, chin propped up in his metal hand, staring at absolutely nothing. He feels heavy all over again and the lag when you try to yank his arm out from under him is worse than ever.

Goddamn it. God fucking damn it.

You can't be the vengeful monster he deserves, so you settle for the next-to-next best thing. You make yourself an annoyance he can't ignore.

When he's going over files you take control and instead of a pencil this time you grab a pen and scrawl over his notes, "Everyone you love is going to move on and die and nothing you can do will stop it. The Institute will destroy everything but they're never going to take a broken heap of garbage like you back. All you got is me and I'm never leaving."

You stab the pen again and again and again into the paper until the rest of it is illegible and then you hand it back over to him. His eyes blink, twice, slowly, and then scan what you've written. He reads it twice. Then he closes the folder and tosses it into a trash can.

Next time you get a felt-tip pen and write on the wall across from his bed. "If the Brotherhood doesn't kill Ellie the Institute will. They will torture every one you've ever loved and turn them into their own little toys. You know what they do with female synths?"

When he sees that he locks up his office and walks down to the water pump. He doesn't say a word as he carries buckets of water home. He doesn't speak while he scrubs down the wall. He scrubs until the skin of his fingers is rubbed thin. He doesn't acknowledge a goddamn thing.

Why won't he fucking say something? Why does he keep on going like nothing's happened?

You push to the front and you take that gritty metal hand of his and you tear at his skin, ripping chunks out of his face and neck. If he's not gonna snap like a human then he doesn't deserve to look like a human. It hurts. It pulls him toward control but you have a little more to say still. You smash his head into the wall as hard as you can and he goes down in a heap.

He puts a hand to the hole you've torn in his face. His mouth works like he's going to speak but he doesn't say a goddamn thing. He just lays there with the water spilled around him, soaking through his clothes.

Get up from that, you want to tell him. Come on. If you're so tough you ought to be able to just shrug this off too.

But he doesn't. He lays there on the floor until that secretary of his comes in, and then he gets up and acts like nothing happened.

"Just slipped," he tells her when she asks. "It's nothing. I'm fine."

But his limbs feel heavier than before. He's nothing but dead weight now.

You've kinda wore yourself out so you let him do whatever it is he's planning on doing. You'll find something else. You'll carve it into his skin. You'll rip off his fucking jaw. You'll hit him day and night with every fucked-up thing you ever had to live with until he realizes what a monumental mistake he's made. You'll do worse than that, just as soon as trying to move his body isn't harder than threading a needle in the dark during a mutant attack.

Valentine lies on his bed with his face to the wall and the blanket wrapped around him.

The secretary doesn't say much. She's probably used to this, him pretending to be so brave and so stoic and so what. She does her own thing while he's laying there pouting and then she heads up the stairs to her bed, and she calls down to him, "Good night, Nick."

He opens his mouth like he's going to reply but doesn't say a word.

There's silence for a while. She's waiting. She waits, and then eventually she gives up and her bedframe squeaks as she crawls under her covers.

He curls up and lays there until you both can hear that she's asleep, and then he walks away.

At first you think maybe he's going out into the stands, find a spot with no people so he can yell at you. But he heads out across the market on his heavy dead limbs. It's only the bots out tonight. You wish like hell you could tell him that. Just some busted robots. The Mr. Handy with the missing limb, the protectron that can only say one thing, an eyebot roaming around with the same Billie Holiday song on loop--and Valentine.

He passes the market, the press, the church, keeps going through the tunnel that leads outside the city. He's gotta wait for the gate to go up, though. Leans against a post and rubs at the hole you put in his face.

"Going out, Mr. Valentine?" the gate guard--what was his name again?--chirps.

"Mmhm."

"On a case? Somebody missing? Anything exciting?"

Valentine shakes his head.

"Just out for a walk, then? Keep an eye out for raiders!"

Christ, the kid's annoying. You shove your way forward and tell him that. With your own fucking voice in Valentine's numb heavy mouth you tell him to go fuck himself, that nobody thinks his incessant optimism is cute, that he serves no purpose, that nobody would miss him if raiders tore his guts out and used them to decorate the streets.

"Sorry," the kid shouts over the grinding noise of the gate going up. "Didn't catch that. What'd you say?"

You don't--neither of you--say anything for a moment because Valentine's back and the two of you are fighting each other for control. Maybe he's good in a real fight (after all, he and that vault dweller did manage to kill you) but trying to get you to let go of the controls is evidently a lot harder. He's slipping.

"Mr. Valentine?"

You turn his head to look at the kid--okay, fine, maybe the kid doesn't know, but he knows. Even if he doesn't know the exact words you used, he knows what you--what he--said.

Valentine manages to give him a watery little smile and shakes his head, and then he ducks under the still-moving gate and runs out into the streets.

That got him, a little, anyway. You let him go. Let him stew. He's good at that.

He moves through the piles of trash on the streets-- _just like you_ , you try to project to him--and goes through a hole in the parking lot fence. There's wild dogs around, you're pretty sure, but you don't see them around. Valentine opens up one of the car doors, slides into the back seat, slams it behind him. He presses his hands to his head and just sits there, rocking back and forth, and he cries.

What?

He doesn't cry-cry, like the kid used to--he doesn't have the capability for that--but he's shaking and his breaths come in little sniffling gasps. He drops his arms and wraps them around himself, tight.

The fuck is he doing?

He sits there for a while, and then he lets go and wipes at his eyes like he's got tears to cry, and then he takes his pistol out of its holster.

"Go on," he says. He puts the muzzle to his head. "I know it's what you want to do."

On instinct you take control for half a second. His entire body still feels heavy, but when you send out a thought his finger twitches on the trigger.

This is a trap. Has to be. It's too easy to be anything else.

He taps the gun against his head and takes a ragged, shuddering breath. "I'll give you this one for free."

Would a head-shot kill him? You don't think so; it's never stopped any other synth you've ever seen. Maybe he's got the gun angled at the place in his brain where you're localized. Maybe he's trying to get you to pull the trigger so you're the one who offs yourself this time. Is this some kind of power trip?

Both of you can feel the pipe gun at his head. He holds it there like he's holding the both of you hostage, and his finger tightens against the trigger, and then he lets his hand and the gun fall to his lap.

"Getting soft in your old age?" he asks. Beneath the crying there's still a certain wryness to his voice. "Come on. What's one more life on your conscience?"

He sinks back against the car seat and looks up at the sky. There must be stars up there. You've seen them yourself, you know they're there. But he doesn't see them. There's too many limits to his optics. No matter how many dead men he has in here with him, he'll never make himself human.

"Any time," Valentine says softly. "It's right here waiting for you."

And then you understand.

You've never been able to see inside his thoughts, but he's not exactly tried to hide them from you. All you had to do was look at the way he threw himself at you with only that fucking pistol and a frightened vault dweller that night in Fort Hagen, at how eager he was to wire you right inside his brain, at how quietly he's taken all your abuse.

No matter how much you hate Nick Valentine, you will never hate him more than he already hates himself.

Poor bastard's already miserable. God knows why--maybe there's just enough organic in him to get the same chemical depression gen 3s get. You don't know what's going on in his thoughts. You don't know why he doesn't just off himself. Like he said, what's one more life on his conscience?

"It's not a sin, you know," you tell him, but he can't hear you, not in the way you can hear him.

His eyes close, and that just leaves the two of you alone together in the dark.

Goddamn it.

You spent your whole life killing, and in the end that's exactly what he wanted. If you kill him he's gonna thank you with his dying breath. What kind of revenge is that?

You don't want to acknowledge it, but the cruelest thing you can do for him is to let him live. Keep him breathing, let him stay in whatever hell he's in, watch him fall apart without your help.

Goddamn it. Fine. If that's what it takes, you'll do it. You can be just as obstinate now as you were alive. He's going to live every single moment in misery, and if he mans up enough to do it himself you'll fight him.

After all, there is one person you want revenge on even more than Valentine. And if that one single survivor, the woman from Vault 111, comes back... well, you can do worse to Valentine than tear up his face.


End file.
